Tales of Traveling the Yellow Brick Road of Hope

“When I was young, my house had a magic door,” writes Elmaz Abinader. “Outside that door was .... “ Well, America was outside that door. Main Street, Masontown, Pa. Kids circled around on the playground and called the girl with unruly hair “darkie.”

But inside was America, too. Mom made hummus and baba ghannouj and pita bread and supervised the children at their chores.

Outside, people spoke English, and little girls played with Barbies. Inside, the family spoke Arabic, and girls canned fruits and pickles in the basement and grew up to be poets. Everyone shopped at the A&P.;

I’ve just peeked in on America’s propaganda campaign. You know, the one where the “great Satan” replies to critics in the world.

The State Department asked 15 notable U.S. writers, including National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winners, to reflect on what it means to grow up in America, to be an American, to write in America.

Their 60-page mini- anthology will be distributed at American embassies abroad.

From Julia Alvarez:

Ay si / it’s my turn / to oh say / what I see, / I’m going to sing America! / with all America inside me.

Immigrants, the children of immigrants, poets, protesters, novelists, a former Marine, dreamers, a Native American, an essayist, the country’s poet laureate -- the very idea of summoning a nation’s literary voices to speak to doubters abroad is a buoyant affirmation of democracy, of pluralism and most of all, of freedom. We could divide the world between countries that might dare such an act and those that would not -- but, in fact, the world has already done that for us.

“The central word about America for many of these writers is ‘possibility,’ ” says George Clack, executive editor of the collection. What better word could a society advance in the fight against intolerance?

U.S. law forbids distribution of government propaganda domestically. But we can eavesdrop on the campaign at the Web site:

us info.state.gov/products /pubs/writers.

For those who like their patriotism wrapped in the flag and delivered with a fist in the air, it might be unsettling to read Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan’s thoughts on “another part of America” -- the army’s 19th century efforts to cripple Indian resistance by slaughtering their horses:

remembering the Kiowa man / who sang to cover the screams / of their ponies killed by the Americans / the songs I know in my sleep.

But what is America if not an endless argument against injustice?

Naomi Shihab Nye tells the story of her father, a Palestinian immigrant, throwing his faded trousers overboard when his boat approached the dock in New York City. “If he was starting a new life, why did he need old pants? ... My father loved the United States for its optimism, and for welcoming him as it had welcomed millions of immigrants before him. Everything was possible in the United States -- this was not just a rumor, it was true.”

What is America if not the deeply grooved yellow brick road of hope?

These testimonials -- wide-ranging, uniformly personal, careful in their sentimentality -- caught my eye because so much of the war against terrorism is being fought with blunt force and bravado, answered by the same.

Yet the pen can explain what the smart bomb cannot: “It’s an implicit aim of our republican form of government,” writes novelist Richard Ford, “that citizens not be so preoccupied with the mechanics and philosophy of citizenship, but rather that we concern ourselves with acting -- even if blithely -- as citizens. National identity is, thus, a means to the end of individual freedom, not an end to itself.”

In this clash of global cultural and religious values, we can presume that zealots overseas have minimal appetite to digest America’s propaganda, true. But that doesn’t make this exercise any less worthwhile.

Our enemies have questioned the purpose of the United States. Here, in a sampler of voices from our hyphenated pedigrees, the Jew, the black, the Latvian, the German, the Swiss, the East Indian, is the reply: We Americans do too, as we always have. It’s what we call our conscience.